CHAPTER VII.
RELIGION, MORALITY, AND ART.
"Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays possessing little heat, are spent in creating beauty."—Lecky, Hist. of Morals.
In his famous picture of the School of Athens, Raphael has represented Plato as looking up towards heaven, while Aristotle has his eyes intently fixed upon the earth; and Goethe has endorsed the idea expressed in this painting. "Plato's relation to the world," he says, "is that of a superior spirit, whose good pleasure it is to dwell in it for a time. . . . He penetrates into its depths, more that he may replenish them from the fulness of his own nature, than that he may fathom their mysteries."[1] Certainly the most careless reader cannot help being struck by the persistency with which Plato dwells upon his favourite thought, that this life is only the first stage of an endless existence, that death is the release of soul from body, which the wise man welcomes with joy, and that philosophy itself is but a "meditation of death," or "the resembling, so far as is possible, of man to God."[2] In fact, disce mori may be
- ↑ Quoted in Ueberweg's History of Philosophy, i. 103—English transl.
- ↑ Phædo, 80; Theæt., 176.
